Corona del Mar 1930s

Virginia Beach

THE SURFING LIFE

By Stewart Ferebee

Virginia Living Magazine - 8/4/2011 (updated/corrected by Stewart on 1/27/2014)

John T. Ferebee, Virginia Beach 1944

Boards in arm, three teens in their twenties go cycling
along the feeder road leading into the low-rise suburban sprawl of the
Northend, past the balmy low-slung Live Oak grove and the frilly bejeweled
Mimosa, speeding by, on windless endless days of summer. Light northwesterlies
now hone clean the aquatic corduroy of an oily slick daybreak Atlantic,
countering sideways with sideways, wind for swell. Drawing lines in their heads
as they pedal in anticipation; there already in psychic momentum before they've
ever even touched the water. This is what we pray for.

The story of surfing in Virginia Beach is one of dedication.
Because in the grand scheme of things its not a place known for its
quality surf by the world class standards of California or Hawaii, Australia,
South Africa or Indonesia. The culprit is a 300 mile wide energy-sapping
joy-killer of swell-reducing shallows known as the Continental Shelf which
mockingly insinuates itself off much of the East Coast. Virginia Beach may
not have the best waves but surfing here has a history—a
formidable one that goes back 100 years and comprises multiple generations. And
there is a story to go with the tradition—one of dedication by a handful of
intrepid thrill-seekers in the early decades of the 20th century, and now, by
modern throngs seeking their own stoke or recognition. Surfers here assiduously
seek those small windows when the conditions are right; where light
opposing winds compliment a maximum swell at optimum tide. And then just hope
you don't get busted for missing work, skipping school or backing out of those
plans you made with your sweetheart.

As surf journalist Matt Warshaw points out, “The jaded and
enervated surfers sprinkled throughout California are nearly
impossible to find on the East Coast, where waist-high waves are often treated
as a gift, not an insult.” Marty Keesecker, a Virginia Beach surfer
and surfboard shaper of nearly 50 years, is even more pragmatic: “There is
something to be said for tenacity,” he says. “If you put the time in, and you drive
enough, you’ll find something to ride. If you’re patient and you don’t expect a
lot, you’ll have fun and it’ll be enough to keep you in the water for an hour
or so. In Virginia Beach, you can’t expect it come to you, you have to go
to it.”

Not a great deal is known about the strange, imported
coffin-like parcel Walter F. Irvin brought back east from Hawaii in 1912 that would signal the coming
phenomenon known as surfing. Irvin’s consignment, which must have flummoxed
terminal baggage handlers upon his disembarkation in Tidewater, was a
9-foot-long, 110-pound redwoodolo, Hawaiian for longboard. It was a
gift for Irvin’s young nephew, James M. Jordan Jr. According to brothers
Jimmy and Shep Jordan in their 1974 book Virginia Beach:
A Pictorial History, it was the first board of its kind on the East
Coast: James M. Jordan Jr. was their grandfather. While the 1912 board was
unique, it wasn’t the first hint of the sport of surfing. In the essay “A Royal
Sport: Surfing in Waikiki,” published in a 1907 issue of The Lady’s Home Companion, adventure writer Jack London detailed the aquatic feats of
early surf pioneer George Freeth and brought news of the
Hawaiian art of wave riding to the new-century masses, writing: “I saw him
tearing in on the back of a wave standing upright, with his board carelessly
poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” Word spread.

In the following years, James Jordan would become locally
famous for his exotic arm-paddled water-craft and wave riding abilities. For
most eastern Victorians however, many of whom did not even swim, the spectacle
must have all been taken with a novel whimsical shrug. Only as time moved along
would the fact begin to resonate so thoroughly on a local level, that it was
Jordan’s flag planted which might very well stake Virginia Beach as the
birthplace of East Coast surfing. Imagining the vast spaces of that era’s
oceanfront, imagining the scene; the place, the pace, the parcel itself; a
lithe young man, soaked from the Gulf current’s warmed brine, hauling
shoulder-hoisted the deftly balanced olo proudly in a terse and yet aloof
sand-scrinching, midday jaunt, from waterline back up to cottage line. Toweling
off, considering the tides; ‘Perhaps another go-out later,’ he winces through
the a.m. glare. Victorian ladies stroll by the grassy beach-lined lawns
sheltered beneath parasols, palming their hats gaily in the summer breeze. Genteel
glances and leisurely nods; the casual elegance of a time which moved to a
different time. ‘Come Josephine, In My Flying Machine’ crackles warped and
softly from a distant Victrola.

In the 1920s and 1930s, amidst the cedar shake grandeur of
the Virginia Beach cottage-hotel era, each little redoubt had its own
stationed lifeguard. During that time, enterprising individuals like Babe
Braithewaite, Hugh Kitchin, Dusty Hinant, John Smith and Buddy Guy would be the
first to organize a formal beach service of lifeguarding and
chair/umbrella/float rentals along theVirginia Beach oceanfront. The
occupation known as “beach bum” was a long way off, but essentially those guys
were pioneers of the surfing and beach subculture that would become a craze in
subsequent decades, culminating in the cheesy fun of the late 1950s to
mid-1960s “Gidget” era.

Thanks to the design innovations of paddleboard maker Tom Blake, surfing was attracting new
devotees. Blake, a Wisconsin native who moved to Hawaii in the
mid-1920s, revolutionized surfing by making hollow boards that were much
lighter than the traditional, solid redwood and Olo
boards, the kind Irvin brought from Hawaii in 1912. These new
boards were much easier to carry and transport than the old ones, thus spawning
surfing’s first micro boom. “Blake changed everything,” former Surfer Magazine editor Drew Kampion
wrote in 2000. “He almost single-handedly transformed surfing from a primitive
Polynesian curiosity into a 20th century lifestyle.”

And it wasn’t long before a new crop of lifeguard/surfers
and fun addicts began heading to the oceanfront from Norfolk and various
rural Princess Anne County communities. One of them was
a Chesapeake Bay harbor pilot, Capt. Robert Barrett Holland, who
would head one of the most prodigious surfing families the sport has ever
known. His son Bob Lee has been a prominent member of the Virginia
Beach surf scene for more than 70 years—from the 1930s to the present. Now
in his 80s, Bob Lee Holland is still surfing—and most notably not on “logs,” or
the traditional longboards that are the preferred gear of the “old guys,” but
on contemporary shortboards.

Bob Lee Holland’s children, Bobby, Johnny and Honey, all
followed in their dad’s footsteps and set the bar for surfing performance and
competition at the beach from the mid-1960s through the 1970s and beyond. Mary
Sydney Barker, a niece, recalls that when she was very young, in the mid-1960s,
“My grandfather, Capt. Holland, said to me, ‘When you can stand on an
inflatable mat and ride the waves in, I will buy you your own surfboard.’ I
surfed on the mats for a few years and when I was 12 he bought me my first
surfboard—a 9-foot-2-inch Hobie. There weren’t many girl surfers around then;
Becky ‘Bobby’ Mellot and I surfed at the North End with a girl named Leslie
Thurston. We would surf in the mornings before the wind came up.”

In contrast, modern surfboards are very thin, short and
relatively inexpensive—about $500 to $600. Contemporary surfers buy new boards
fairly regularly. Jordan Brazie, a 23-year-old surfer-shaper who has been
surfing since he was 12, owns 11 boards and uses all of them—“whichever is the
most functional for the waves of that day,” he says. “You have to have a quiver
if you want to surf all year.”

But in the early days of the sport, boards were cherished
items—hand-made and regarded more like boats. Surfers personalized them with
artistic touches much like airmen created nose-art for World War I-and-II-era
planes. Hugh Kitchin whitewashed the name “Hugh Boy” across his board from rail
to rail. Capt. Robert Holland’s board was emblazoned with the twin flags
insignia of the Chesapeake Bay Harbor Pilot Association.

My late father, a Norfolk native, was an
avid Virginia Beach surfer from the mid-1940s through the 1980s. He
hand-painted the French word coquette (flirt), on his board in a
two-tone gothic script. He began surfing when he was 15 then became a lifeguard
at the Cavalier Hotel and Beach Club on 43rd Street. The majestic old
structure, the most iconic landmark of the entire oceanfront, was built in 1929
(the same year brewery tycoon Adolph Coors threw himself from an upper floor),
and of course it still stands today. One prays it always will.

Legend has it that my fathers introduction into surfing
concerned one blustery December morning during the august years of World
War II, following a saturday night which got so late it became the next day. A
night which concerned pipes and tobacco, Lucky Strikes and Stan Freeberg
records. And powerful, clear, amber liquid poured over ice into tall glasses.
Fellow Norfolk native Mason Gamage of Algonquin Park was onboard for that weekend’s
oceanfront festivities. Gamage, several years older than the rest, fresh out of
the Coast Guard, was an outdoorsman and sailor, and already surfed. Nursing a
hangover and yet full of bravado, Gamage and my father both paddled out into
the cold stormy brown Atlantic conditions on two 13 foot wooden boards. In this
modern world of high tech neoprene, the winter protection for a surfer, it is
almost impossible to even begin to comprehend this anecdote, decades before the
wide spread use of the now vitally indispensable cold water wetsuit.
Nevertheless, a seed was planted; and as veteran surfer Mike Clark points out,
"Once you get salt water in your veins, it is hard to stay away from
it."

In 1950, my father forsook his beloved beach boy lifestyle
in Tidewater to fly F-86’s out of Kimpo in Korea. He returned about five
years later and began his career in the insurance industry, resuming his
surfing on weekends. He met my mother, Ann Meredith Stewart, in 1956 and they
spent their first date sanding old varnish off his Tom Blakesurfboard
at a place near Rudee Inlet on the oceanfront’s south end, near the Sandbox—a
café and home for years to the annual and infamous Subway party. It was an
epic, if charming, first-date faux pas.

“At that time,” says Mike Clark, “there was no inlet and no
pier at the south end. We could walk over to Croatan at low tide. Later, in the
1950s, I remember the building of the Steel Pier 15 blocks south of the wooden
pier. You can tell a real native when they say Wooden Pier; that is how we
referred to them—steel and wood.” Clark adds, “Shooting the pier was
a hoot. My dad bought our first board from Dawson Taylor at Fuel Feed Hardware,
a Hobie. It was before the Smith & Holland
shop opened. My brother and I shared the board.” Norfolk native Scott
McCasky, a competitive surfer for more than four decades, also has fond
recollections of the south end’s golden, post-war era: “Every day you were
there, surfing at the steel pier gave you the undeniable feeling you were in
the right place at the right time.”

Pete Smith, age 71, is a mid-century “grom”—an old-timer who
still retains a youthful stoke. In recent months he has shared with me many
anecdotes about the early days of surfing in Virginia Beach and the
ways in which the scene has changed. Looking at photos from the 1960s, he can
name practically every individual who surfed in that decade. In a shot taken in
front of the erstwhile Mariner Hotel, Smith points out the different types of
boards displayed by the diverse group of surfers in the picture: The first
generation of wooden hollow boards are held by the guys in the back row, and
the new fiberglass boards are held by the guys kneeling in the front row.
Three Hollands are in the photograph, along with Scott Taylor, Frank
Butler, Skip Rawls, Snooker Turner and Babe Braithwaite’s son, Forbes. Says
Smith: “The early years were amazing, because there was just so much community
stoke and you knew everybody. It was a really good vibe. There weren’t any
crowds; you’d be looking for people to surf with just to have someone to hoot
and holler with. It was that transformative era where the old wooden boards
were still around but the modern fiberglass boards were starting to show up. It
was just a really special time.”

Significantly, a Californian named Les Arndt, then stationed
at Fort Story, is also in the group picture. According to Forbes
Braithwaite, Arndt was from Malibu and worked for top board maker Hap
Jacobs before coming east for his military duty. “Arndt was driving past one
day with another soldier,” says Braithwaite, “and saw me going surfing, carrying
Scott Taylor’s balsa-wood board. He yelled, ‘Hey kid where’d you get that
surfboard?’” Arndt himself recollects that Forbes was about 12 at the time, and
was walking across Atlantic Avenue at 49th Street. The chance
meeting prompted Arndt to spend two years with Virginia Beach surfers,
especially Bob Holland and his family, during which time he helped to get
“modern Malibu surfing started in Virginia Beach,” according to Arndt.

How? Thanks to Arndt’s West Coast connections, the group
started importing and selling what was at that time a rare and exotic
item—modern fiberglass boards from California. The group stored them in a
garage owned by Forbes Braithwaite’s mother. In 1963, Pete Smith and Bob Holland opened the
area’s first dedicated surf shop—Smith & Holland—one of the first
businesses of its kind on the East Coast.

Not long after, Smith wrote a letter to Surfer Magazine, in California, trumpeting
the burgeoning surfing scene inVirginia Beach. He wrote the note on the
letterhead of the Golf Ranch Motel on Laskin Road, which was situated on
the southeast end of Birdneck golf course and owned, along with the Mariner, by
Pete’s uncle, John Smith. Pete worked there. John Severson, then editor of Surfer Magazine, showed the letter to Hobie
Alter who was the top California board maker at that time. Some
months later, Alter showed up at the Golf Ranch Motel on a day when Pete was
working. For Virginia Beach surfing, that was a monumental moment.
Alter was on the East Coast pushing his boards, and he negotiated a deal with
Smith and Holland to carry his boards exclusively.

The early 1960s were a pivotal time in modern surfing. In
addition to the new availability of Hobie Alter’s boards on the East Coast, the
first East Coast surf contest was started in 1962 on Gilgo Beach on Long
Island. Bob Holland drove a group of Virginia Beach surfers to New
York for the event, including Butch Maloney, Gary Rice and an 11-year-old
whirlwind talent named Ronnie Mellot, a future Golden Gloves Army boxing champ,
local board shaper and all around wild man. Many of the VB guys took trophies
at Gilgo—they dominated the field. In 1963, with cooperation from the local
chamber of commerce, Holland, Maloney and Pete Smith managed to move the
pro-amateur surf contest to Virginia Beach, re-naming it the Virginia
Beach Surfing Festival. Two years later they changed the name again, to
the East Coast Surfing Championships (ECSC).
2012 will mark the event’s 50th year, drawing high-ranking surf talent from
around the globe. While ever-increasingly upgrading its carnival-bling to
include many non-surf stage-draws such as BMX biking, Jet-Ski antics, and even
Cornhole contests (beanbag), presumably in hopes of enticing more diverse and
consequently larger audiences, such distractions on the other hand, threaten a
diffusion of what is still implicitly touted, according to what it’s very
initials imply, as a surfing championship. Prophetically harking back to 1972
and Chuck Dent’s antic rant-alogue from MacGillivray Freeman’s classic surf
film, Five Summer Stories, surf-culture and surfing itself often find
themselves at curious odds. A hallowed tradition to some, a three-ring
spectacle to others; the ECSC is the East Coast’s longest running surfing
competition.

Even from its very early years, the ECSC attracted
world-class surfers such as David Nuuhiwa, Corky Carroll and Mike Tabeling,
along with the best locals. Near the old Cue South, Pete Smith would preside
from atop a simple lifeguard stand at the Steel Pier site with nothing more
than a clipboard, a visor and a microphone, uttering witty, surf-speak-laced
Southernisms in his consummate, slow-mo Tidewater accent. “It was just a
special time in those early days of the ECSC,” recalls Smith, “when some of the
real hot West Coast and Floridian surfers started coming to the contest. It was
such a thrill meeting some of those guys we’d seen in all the magazines, and
getting to see them surf.”

By the middle of the 1960s, the West Coast-informed surf
boom was fully realized here in the East. In 1965, the Academy Award nominated documentary
surf film “The Endless Summer” opened at the madly mod, and
very much missed, Buckminster Fuller-designed Virginia Beach Dome; the
tragically decommissioned and dissected artifact of what would nowadays be
considered a world-renowned tourism-draw of exemplary Mid-century
modernism. Filmmaker Bruce Brown traveled with the movie in those early days
and narrated live over a speaker system in his laconic west coast style,
as the mellow twang of The Sandals soundtrack played from a reel-to-reel tape
machine. My mother and father were there on opening night. My mother recalls
Bob Holland’s youngest son, Johnny, zooming around barefoot on his skateboard,
the newest must-have accoutrement of
1960’s surf culture. Johnny would become a standout competitive surfer, one of
the most gifted wave riders this area ever produced, competing in the World
Surfing Championships in California in 1966 going neck to neck along the way in
preliminary events with many of this areas best surfers such as Billy Foote,
George Desgaines, Fred Grosskreutz, Jimmy Parnell, Bobby Chenman, Billy Almond
and Nat Meakins.

In June of 1968, Sports
Illustrated did a cover story titled “Surfing’s East Coast Boom.”
The cover photo, taken from the steel pier looking south, shows visiting
California and Hawaii legend Phil Edwards gracefully negotiating the
micro-curl of a fun-looking right-hander breaking in the once sacred, now
mythical, 75-yard zone between the north side of the First Street jetty and the
south side of the pier. (Roughly 10 years later, the rickety Steel Pier would
catch fire and be demolished, prompting locals to rename the popular surfing
spot as The Jetty or simply First Street. Surfing
Magazine once referred to the area as a “a two-block surfing insane
asylum.”) Edwards is quoted in the article, speaking to the core of what
surfing is really all about—beyond the contests, sponsorships and
commercialism: “I think maybe the best surfer in the world right now is some
little kid whose name nobody knows. . . who is riding out there by himself;
locked in some curl somewhere, having the ride of his young life. God, it’s the
neatest thing.”

Almost as quickly as the change in surfboards took place as
the post-war 50s entered the Pop era, so did the Longboards begin to obsolesce
at the dawn of the speed-conscious mind shift which presaged the shortboard
revolution. Spearheaded on a local level by pioneer board shaper Bob White and
his Wave Riding Vehicles quiver of space-aged teardrop foils, lines would be
defiantly be drawn in the sand denoting stances in style and of generation gaps;
and drawn in the water in ways hitherto unimagined. The area’s first nationally
recognized surfer of the new high performance generation, was a lithe,
flame-haired, scat-talking wild child named Jimbo Brothers. Something of a
prodigy, a beach-blanket ragamuffin of Dickensian proportions, Brothers would
dominate local and interstate competitions of the late 60s and early 70’s; a
sponsored team rider since the 7th grade, profiled in Surfer magazine by the
time he was 10. “One year the newspaper published a picture of me with my
trophies and I was struggling to hold up the silver bowl and the wooden plaque
at the same time,” says Brothers, now in his late 50’s. “And the caption read,
‘Jimbo had more trouble with his loot than he did with the waves.’"

As the swinging 60's dwindled and the existentially
ambiguous 70's reached cruising altitude, the contemporary Shortboard milieu
would dominate the kinetic surfing scene at both the Steel Pier and the Wooden
Pier, as well as on early pioneering ventures to the sometimes world-class
conditions of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. As my brother Terry Ferebee would
always point out, “You can’t really talk about surfing in Virginia Beach
without talking about OBX.” Even for Norfolk boys Gregg Bielmann and his brother
Brian, a future world-class, Hawaii-based surf photographer, early-era Hatteras
road trips were instigated fairly often in hopes of scoring ‘Hassle-less’,
crowd-free, proper surf. As the kaleidoscopic decade of changes pressed on,
standouts such as Marc Theriault, Joe Marchione, Chucky Charles, Ed and Chip
McQuilken, Bill Frierson, Ronnie Mellot, Ray Shackleford, Bennet Strickland,
Allen White, Kurt & Tim Schmalz, Jeff Duff, Paul Darden, Ed Townes and
Christian Binford would set the performance bar as surfboards would go smaller
and more spearishly radical. Through Marshall McLuhan’s rear-view mirror,
decade’s stack up in idyllic compression like so many Smithsonian
diorama’s, where diverse transformations occur in time-lapse, all at once, both
cultural and technological. Tail-ending the 60’s and front-facing the
70’s, a revolution in both surfboards and wetsuits will transpire; both,
ironically, the by-products of the very military-industrial complex so derided
by the inner circles of Vietnam War era surf culture bohemia. A cast of
characters straight out of Tom Wolfe’s Pumphouse Gang rule the Steel Pier
parking lot, that sacred ‘our turf’ zone consisting of stray dogs,
ramshackle vehicles, surfer drop-outs, and fishermen-widowers. Al’s Surfshop
beneath the ramp of the pier smells of resin, bloodworms, incense and wax; and
nearby foosball tables rattle and clatter with roll-fake's, shout-out’s,
shut-up's and crank-shots. While Trampled Under Foot by Led Zeppelin blares
from the Jensen Tri-axles of Jeff Duff’s forrest green Karmann Ghia
as it sputters its way off the Loop road towards fifty-cent tacos at
Speedy Gonzales at Great Neck and Mill Dam. Dusk soothes everything,
and in the days before video killed the radio star, BYOB surf movie nights
at the ironically designated FOP hall (Federation of Police Hall) rounds out
nicely the any-day of all-days, of the seemingly never-ending ever-present
summer of the early-mid-late nineteen-seventies.

The most notable stylist and competitor of the late years of
the decade’s new guard, was a 6-foot-4-inch paddling machine named Wes Laine
who brought serious recognition to Virginia Beach and East Coast surfing in general. Laine placed
ninth in the world on the pro tour circuit in both 1983 and 1985 competing in
line-ups as far flung as Hawaii and South Africa. “Wes was the
first Virginia Beach guy to make it in the big time,” says Tim
Sullivan, a local surfer turned guitarist for the New York City-based surf
music band, Supertones. “He paved the way for other East Coasters, and even
10-time world champ Kelly Slater.” Through Wes, vicariously, directly, or
otherwise, The Free Ride generation found one of its exemplary representatives
right here at our own beach-breaks. A local lineup was never more proud.

While competitions are one aspect of surfing, they do not
figure extensively in the lives of most surfers, who simply surf for the sake
of surfing—art for art’s sake as it were. “Are there any soul-surfers still
among us; still expressing the original vision?”, as free-thinking local
legend Chip McQuilkin once ruminated on the ever-encroaching influence of
commercialism on surfing. “For without soul,” he warned, “there IS no
vision.” Still, owing to Laine’s pro-circuit success, there was a sharp rise in
competitive intensity among surfers at the beach in the 1980’s and 1990’s. By
then it was not at all unusual for local surfers to explore Hawaiian-alternative
big-wave training grounds such as Puerto Rico and Barbados, following in
the footsteps of early 1970’s pioneers like Marc Theriault and Ronnie Mellot.
Adding also to the area’s distinct identity was a continuing tradition of local
surfboard making—niche-specific wave-tools better suited to
the corporocity of Virginia's swellular vernacular than many of the
imported shapes built in California or Hawaii. The same tradition is alive and
well today, noting talented young shapers such as Jordan Braizie and his
Valaric label, and Austin Saunders at Austin. Throughout the golden era of
the shortboard revolution, Bob White, Rosi, Con, America, WRV, Westwind,
Bearcraft, Seasoned, and Hotline all bore the local standard. The surfer-shaper
reigns in the days before automation.

As another era exerts itself inexorably towards the
future, and another checkered decade comes jangling to a close—another balmy
Tidewater day at the Oceanfront wanes, as Allen White smooths another wave to
pieces.

As the 80s forced its way in on the preceding decade, some
people stuck with the beach music program. With the pinks, the greens. And the
Shag. Others moved on. Others still, never went there in the first place. Punk
rock changed everything. So did the Thruster. The revolutionary three-finned
board developed by Australian surfer-shaper Simon Anderson would
hegemonistically dominate surfboard design for the next two and half decades.

The 80s new modernity was exemplified locally by the
enigmatic, freeform genius of Pete Smith’s son, Pete Jr., known colloquially in
surfing circles as simply “young Pete Smith.” As Les Shaw, the owner of Wave
Riding Vehicles, says, “You gotta understand, the most unsung raw talent to
ever come out of this area was young Pete Smith, with that stream of
consciousness surfing style he had. He was just light years beyond everyone
else in his approach.” Of the Blaster era and the early Quad, there were other
dynamic standouts as well: Jon Klientop and Charles Kirkley dominated local ESA
(Eastern Surfing Association) contests as well as ECSC events. Other notables
of the era included Jay Monroe, Lad Swain, Rich Rudolph and Tommy Rainwater, as
the culminating decade of the millennium would introduce a whole new crop of
competitive upstarts, including Chris Culpen and Jason Borte who would go on to
dominate in contests, both locally and nationally.

And what of today’s young surfers? Interestingly, a
free-thinking new crew of stylists would seem to at least potentially defy
Oscar Wilde’s maxim that youth is wasted on the young. Theirs is a teen milieu
which seeks retrieval from the past in order to move flowingly into the future;
its creed ingrained by a reverence to history, tradition, and for the old guys.
Semi-pro longboarder Cam Fullmer, who is 17 and a senior at Norfolk Academy,
for example, grew up at the Northend and was taught by resident local Bud
Easton, whose daughter Kate is—like Fullmer—a team rider for Freedom Surfshop.
Fullmer and his tight circle are primarily longboarders, a neo-retro discipline
which leaves many diehard Thruster-era types in a state of bemused
stupefaction. That’s because the longboard is, to all appearances, an aquatic
reversion to the horse and buggy. But given the consistently modest surf
at Virginia Beach, it is a tool which is actually both efficient and
functional. And there are other implications—both philosophical and
cultural—that reach down into the very core of the user. “It’s less jock-like,
maybe,” says Fullmer of the longboard wave-riding technique. He often uses the
word ‘motionlessness’ to suggest what it is he is after in his surfing. Of a
slight generational gap past Fullmer, fellow Freedom Surfshop team riders Sam
Cocke and Mikey Hansen likewise exemplify the super-soulful and stylish
aesthetic of the new sincerity, ever-touting the merits of the old-school.

Contrary to some prior generations' nonchalance towards
their predecessors, Fullmer speaks reverently about local, old-school veterans
like Bob Holland, Mike Clark, Mike Kalana and Bobby Holland Jr.: “Mike
is—what?—like in his 70s?” says Fullmer. Gesticulating with glancing, flat-hand
motions the way all real surfers do, he adds: “I mean, he can crank a turn; he
can cross-step to the nose; he can ride in the pocket and work it with his
knees and just ride a wave like its supposed to be ridden…ride a board like its
supposed to be ridden. Those guys are always the best ones to talk to. I’d
rather talk to them than 99 percent of the surfers my age. They always have
something good to say about surfing or about life.” Glancing around at the
radically changing psychic contour of the ever-developing oceanfront, he says:
“Old Virginia Beach must have been just the coolest thing.”

He would get no disagreement on that point from Dave
Shotten, who opened Freedom Surf shop in 2005. Shotten, who by his own
admission is an eternal grom in a 44-year-old body, laments the fact that
contemporary surf culture has become homogenized. “It’s been diluted
with Orange County propaganda that caters to a naive young audience
who want conformity.” Freedom Surf sells imported boards yet sports a community
vibe, selling gear relevant to the area’s surf conditions. “We are the new kids
on the block,” says Shotten. “But at the same time we’ve been gifted a legacy
and tradition that has been handed down from some of the original pioneers who
put boards in the water in Virginia Beach. Our vision is to look back into
the past and celebrate what a surf shop means. We’re about taking a different
path.”

In
truth, surfing at Virginia Beach has always been something of a
different path. We’re not on the map of world-class surf spots, and never will
be. But surfers here show their sincere respect for the sea, possess a core
dedication to the art form we love, and stay ever vigilant for conditions that
produce the best waves.

1957

“I talked my mom into
buying my first board… a nine-foot, six-inch Velzy and Jacobs balsa board with
thirty-two ants in the glass job. Velzy
told me the ants wouldn’t hurt anything and I believed him. I remember my mom’s words: ‘This board is
probably just like everything else you want.
You’ll use it for a week and throw it away.’

“I showed her! We still laugh about it. Mom painted a totem pole on that first board
and later I sold it to the real Gidget for fifteen bucks...”

“I named Velzyland when I first began making
movies in ‘58… I also named Pipeline, and Severson came along and
renamed it BanzaiBeach. As a compromise, it became Banzai Pipeline. Now it’s Pipeline again.”

“In the fifties, the North
Shore was a dream. It was all so new. And so cheap to live there. You’d find every way you could to stretch a
hundred bucks. The deal was, who could
get the cheapest house and get the most people in it? You could rent a house then for sixty to
seventy dollars a month. With twelve
guys sharing the rent, that hundred bucks went a long way.”

“It used to be that all
the guys who rode big waves were good watermen -- good swimmers, sailors or
paddlers who knew the ocean, the currents tides. You could get into a lot of trouble, get
sucked to the wrong side of WaimeaBay, if you didn’t know what you
were doing…”

“There was fierce
competition -- on a friendly basis, of course -- among the big-wave riders:
Peter Cole, Pat Curren, Mike Stange, Jose Angel, Ricky Grigg, Buzzy Trent, George Downing and myself. This was the nucleus of guys during my time
who really enjoyed riding big waves.
Each guy had his own personality and his own deal.”

“I’d love to say
something heroic. I’d love to say we
made history. But basically it was a
bunch of guys parked around the Bay there, and somebody grabbed a board and
went surfing, and it looked so good the rest of us guys said, ‘Hey, we got to
get in on this.’“

The years 1956-58 were pivotal in the further
development of the modern surfboard – the board that Bob Simmons had primarily ushered in,
along with the help of Joe Quigg. These
were the years of experimentation with polyurethane foam as the primary floatation
factor. The use of “foam“ and fiberglass would replace balsa and fiberglass; just like
balsa had replaced redwood/balsa planks; just like redwood and balsa
strip combination boards had replaced redwood which had replaced koa.[10]

The year 1957 was the last official
year of the balsa era. Even so,
it is good to keep in mind that much of the technological advance with foam and
fiberglass occurred somewhat clandestinely while balsa still reigned. Sure, we can say that 1956-58 was the
development of the polyurethane foam board.
At the same time, we have to keep in mind that the rest of the tribe
didn’t catch up to these changes until a year or two after it was a fait
accompli – a done deal. That puts it
more at the beginning of the 1960s than the end of the 1950s.

Although foam did not immediately
replace balsa, by late 1958 and 1959, it became evident to most of
those on the inside that this was the way surfboard manufacturing was to go. Leaders in this new technology included Doug
Sweet, Hobie Alter and Grubby Clark.

No one knew, during 1957, that the
year would mark the end of an era and that surfing would change radically
because of foam. The primary technology
on most minds that year might have been rocket and satellite science, as it was
then that what was the U.S.S.R. -- the Soviet Union -- successfully launched
Sputniks I and II, the first artificial earth
satellites. The fact that the Communist Russians had done
it first was threatening to the western democracies.

By the time the year was over for
surfers, the big news was Waimea. Since Dickie Cross‘s death there in 1943, there had been a voodoo
associated with the place. Not to say
that people no longer surfed the spot; just that those who did were few and far
between. It took transplanted
Californians like Greg Noll and Buzzy Trent to add Waimea to the list of
big wave surf spots. It was in November
of that year that the old spell was broken and a new one begun.

Meanwhile, in the Land Down Under...

Oz Malibu’s

A year after Tommy Zahn, Bob Moore, Mike Bright and Greg Noll left their “Malibus“ behind in Australia,[11]
Ampol Oil films of the Americans’ surfing demonstrations
were still being shown throughout the urban areas of Australia. The viewings at surf lifesaving clubs Down Under caused a
revolution in Australian surfboard design and marked the beginning of
contemporary Australian surfing. In
addition, Greg Noll’s movies of the trip helped spark interest in Oz. As testimony of the impact that the Americans
made in Australia, in 1956, and the ensuing change in
Aussie board design, even today, longboards in Australia
are still often referred to as “Malibus.”[12]

Several of the Australian surfboard
manufacturers wrote to companies in Equador in attempts to import the
necessary balsa wood. “They
were instructed to contact Arthur Milner,” wrote Nat Young, “who came to Sydney to discuss exactly what size
timber was required for the expected boom.
Business arrangements took a long time in those days and it wasn’t until
the summer of ‘58 that their first shipment arrived.” The local shapers then began to learn the
unique properties of balsa wood. “The
lightest planks were the whitest,” continued Young, “with flecks of dark gray
grain running through them; the hardest, but heaviest, were the greener, darker
ones. Selection of the planks was an
intricate part of the process; you used the lighter ones down the center, the
heavier, more durable ones towards the rails.
A scarf joint to give lift was the same as
Simmons had devised 10 years earlier. As
most of South America’s good quality balsa was going to the USA, Australia was sent some pretty scratchy
shipments. By 1958 the established manufacturers
had moved out of Sydney’s
densely-populated eastern suburbs to the northside and the recently opened
industrial suburb of Brookvale. At one end of Brookvale was Barry Bennett; at the other end, Gordon
Woods; and in the middle, Bill
Wallace. Bill Clymer was in a garage in Manly where he and Joe Larkin did some beautiful work,
using stringers, nose blocks and tail blocks made from cedar and redwood to set off the blond balsa.

“Gordon Woods remembers the days of the bad
balsa shipments only too well; he made it a rule to always inspect the load on
the truck. On one occasion he found it
all to be greenish, heavier style. He
turned the shipment straight around, realising that one heavy board could ruin
his reputation.”[13]

The Mainland

What would become a surf music
standard in the beginning of the 1960’s, 1957 produced a song by the Champs
called “Tequila.”[14] It is still often heard, today, on “the
Oldies” radio stations.

Dale Velzy introduced the “7-11“ series. Named for their length, these boards caused a
minor sensation for a couple of years and then disappeared.[15]

Wetsuits were still under development,
although dry suits had been available in kit form since after World War II. Bev Morgan is generally credited with
first introducing surfing wetsuits via Buzzy Trent in 1953.[16]

To deal with the cold factor involved
in surfing California
waters, fires were generally made on the beach to warm bodies
between go-outs. “Typical burnables at Malibu,” wrote C.R. Stecyk, “included boards from the
big fence; flotsam and jetsam like boxes, automobile tires and tree branches.”

On a foggy March 8, 1957, a burning “mistake” was made
when “Dale Velzy is horrified to find Mickey Dora burning his new wooden camera
tripod, carrying case and several reels of just-shot movie films. Dora ran from Velzy, claiming innocence. ‘Jesus, Hawk, I thought the stuff was just
driftwood.’“[17]

Another Malibu incident occurred several months
later, on September 30th:

“Ever since the days of Simmons and
his aggro bicycle race challenges, the sporting life has
flourished at Malibu. Today’s combatants are the ever humble Miki Chapin Dora, driving his clean Iron Mountain-bodied wood 1949 Ford station
wagon, and Hap Jacobs, who will pilot his brand new
premiere issue 1957 Ford Ranchero. The course will be the Malibu drag strip (which to outsiders might
be better known as Highway 101). Side by side, the drivers sit waiting for the
start signal. Many observers wonder if
Miki has any chance against Hap’s newer, sleeker car. Local lore relates that the stakes are two
cases of Dundee Scotch against a new Velzy-Jacobs surfboard. As they come off the line Hap lunges ahead,
but as he slams into second, the old woodie screeches into the lead leaving
Jacobs in the dust. No contest. Later, Dora’s car provides a couple of clues
as to just how this upset victory was accomplished. Velzy notices that as Miki revs up the
engine, there is such immense power transfer and torque that the entire car
twists and flexes. This bending of the
old woodie is so severe that the half inch bolts which hold
down the specially treated phenolic resined wood panels are actually coming
loose during acceleration. A pop of the
hood confirms all suspicions, for grafted into the engine compartment is a new
Briggs Cunningham prepped V8 392 Chrysler
Hemihead, featuring over 400 horses of
brutal acceleration.”[18]

On December 11, 1957, “A television mogul wearing a stiff,
pin-striped suit barges into the shaping emporium of Velzy and Jacobs,” wrote
C.R. Stecyk of another incident that year.
“The stranger’s aggressive behavior and peculiar speech mannerisms
instantly launches Hap into hysterical laughter. Dale, always ready for a good joke, pumps the
interloper for info. An executive from a
popular TV
show says, ‘Babe, the man Steve-O Reeno needs a hep cat surfboard custom built
immediately, it will make you both famous.
The guys and dolls will break down your door begging for boards just
like it.’

Jacobs is now incredulous. ‘You mean Steve Allen surfs?’ he asks. Velzy is no longer amused. (Being more famous than he cared for already,
and being 80 board orders behind... well.)
The TV man realizing that he’s being shut out, quickly changes
tactics. He begins sobbing, ‘Come on
guys it’s my job, you’ve got to help me, I’ll pay anything.’

Hearing these words, Dale, ever the
humanitarian, especially if you’ve got the cash, says, ‘OK, maybe we can work
this out.’ Hap and Velzy now spend days
trying to figure out how to construct a surfboard that can be ridden in a TV
studio by a kook that cannot even stand up. Their ingenious answer -- a full sized balsa,
South Bay shape, complete with hidden roller skate wheels
allows Steve Allen to ‘surf’ across a sound stage pulled by a rope. The bit will be exhibitioned 35 years later
by the Museum of Broadcasting as art. Velzy and Jacobs don’t recall ever being paid
for this job. Later, some wag was heard
to ponder whether this was truly the first televised occurrence of
skateboarding?”[19]

“I talked my mom into buying my first
board then,” recalled Doyle, “a nine-foot, six-inch Velzy and Jacobs balsa
board with thirty-two ants in the glass job.
Velzy told me the ants wouldn’t hurt anything and I believed him. I remember my mom’s words: ‘This board is
probably just like everything else you want.
You’ll use it for a week and throw it away.’

“I showed her! We still laugh about it. Mom painted a totem pole on that first board
and later I sold it to the real Gidget for fifteen bucks. At the time, my father was in the Navy at Point Mugu. He drove past Malibu every day -- a great deal for
me! I became ‘Malibu Mike’ and was at
Malibu during the sixties, during the renaissance era of surfing, when Mickey
Dora, Gidget, the Beach Boys and all the excitement of
surfing was coming on strong. In those
days, when the Big South started pumping, every hot surfer on the coast would
come to Malibu, the true proving grounds.”[20]

“Both John Severson and Fred Van Dyke had come to the Islands
through their enlistment in national service,” wrote Young. “‘Silvertongue’ Severson had been clever
enough to persuade the army to let him start a surf team of which he and Van
Dyke were the first enlistments. On
strict orders to go out and surf for their country, they proceeded to ride waves
all over Oahu.”[22]

“An unknown but aggressive surfer,
John Severson, appeared in 1957,” wrote Fred Van Dyke. “I think he was one of the first to hot-dog big waves...

“He was in the army, an artist, and salivating
profusely at the thought of riding Hawaii.
As a hobby, he took 16mm surf films and painted
watercolors of island seas, especially abstract surf impressions. John used to sit at Waikiki on weekends, and sell a
watercolor of a surf scene for two dollars.
It paid for film to shoot surf and for gasoline from Waianae to the North Shore.”[23]

“Severson remembers his first brush
with big waves only too well,” Nat Young continued. “He paddled out at Makaha on perhaps the first big
swell of the year. Perfect ten to twelve
feet, glassy bowl surf with no-one out.
After pushing back all the adrenaline induced by steady doses of Fred
Van Dyke‘s scrapbook and Fred’s
stories of Waimea Bay closing out, being sucked
into a lava tube, and being dragged out to sea by rip tides, John
finally found the line-up. A big blue
glassy peak showed about half a mile out and he paddled around to a take-off
position, trying to keep his appointment with his first big-wave
experience. Without knowing about the
infamous Makaha bowl, John stood up just as the wave was leaping
up to form the bowl. The board and John
parted company, John falling through space until he hit the wave again and was
pitched over the falls. Eventually he
came up very alone and a long way from shore.”[24]

“Pat Curren was a classic character as
well as an amazing surfer,” credited Nat Young.
“He camped on a vacant lot near Pipeline so he could go surfing
whenever he wanted to.”[25] But Curren was a surfer long before the NorthShore. He had begun in MissionBeach and later La Jolla:

“I grew up bodysurfing and belly boarding in MissionBeach,”
Pat Curren told Steve Yarbrough in 1993. “In World War II guys started with
balsa-redwood boards. In the early ‘50s I moved to La
Jolla and got really serious about it. At Wind ‘n Sea Buzzy Bent, Towny Cromwell, Buddy Hall and the Eckstrom brothers were riding 10-11 foot planks. Buzzy was one of the first to ride the Quigg
chip, a fiberglass and balsa surfboard nine feet long, 22
to 23 inches wide, turned-down rails, trying to get rocker with a pretty flat bottom.”[26]

“To be a La Jolla surfer in the ‘50s,” wrote
Bruce Jenkins, “meant you never held
back: in your drinking, your partying or especially your surfing,
where the test of skill was a double-overhead day at Windansea. Nobody savored that life, or typified it
more, than Patrick King Curren.

“The most rebellious group of people I
ever met,” said Fred Van Dyke. “I’m sure some of them came from rich
families, but they rejected that kind of life, ridiculed it. If a guy made some money, he’d go out and buy
everybody food and drink, and the next day he’d be scrounging for a cup of
coffee. They
were like wild animals.”[28]

“With the Mexican border beckoning,” continued
Jenkins, “groups of them would go on blind-drunk Tijuana rages for days, waking up on
some roadside without a clue where they were.
Pranks and daredevil stunts were the very essence of
their lives.

“They all surfed big Windansea -- out of sheer
determination, if not raw talent -- and when the first films and still photos arrived with
big wave images of Hawaii, nearly all of them made the pilgrimage. Curren didn’t even start surfing until 1950, the year he turned 18, but
by 1955 he was among the first serious wave of
California surfers to take on Makaha and Sunset.”[29]

“Nobody taught me,” Curren said. “Does anybody teach anybody? It’s kind of like learning how to ride a
bike. Somebody gives you a push, then
watches you crash into a pole.”[30]

“Curren was a little older than the
rest,” wrote Jenkins, “and with his lifestyle honed by the La Jolla days, he set the tone for
North Shore living.”[31]

“He molded it into a state-of-the-art
lifestyle,” recalled Greg Noll. “He had
this terrible old ‘36 Plymouth, probably the shittiest car of
all time, and the cops gave him a
bunch of crap about having the front windshield knocked out. Pat always had this way about him, getting
from Point A to B in the shortest distance, without getting real complicated. So he just jerked out one of the side windows
and wedged it onto the driver’s side, and he got away with that for a couple
months. That was his idea of a
windshield.”[32]

The NorthShore was mostly just farmland back
in those days, “and you basically had a bunch of local people growing food,
raising pigs and chickens,” recalled Noll.
“When Pat and I went on patrol, there wasn’t a chicken or a
duck that was safe. I can still see us
running down the beach at Pupukea with a big fat chicken in
each hand, calves burning in the soft sand with a couple of pit bulls on our
ass. We’d barbeque ‘em up later and have a hell
of a dinner. Pat was also a pretty
decent fisherman and a great diver. So
between the ocean, the chickens and the ducks, he got along pretty good.”[33]

“I started shaping boards in 1956-57,” Curren said. “I was walking down the beach at Waikiki and a guy at a rental board place asked me who had made
the board I was carrying. I said I
did. He asked me to make 20 rental
boards. So I rented a shop in Haleiwa and got into it.”[34]

“They lived out of cars and panel
trucks,” surf writer Bruce Jenkins continued his description of North Shore
surfer life in the mid-1950s, “slept on the beach when all
else failed, and occasionally got to rent an actual building. In a truly inspired moment, Curren created a
surfer’s palace that came to be known as Meade Hall.”[35]

“It was mostly Pat and the La Jolla guys -- maybe 10 guys
altogether,” said Fred Van Dyke. “It was
a three-bedroom, fully furnished place for $65 a month across from Ke Iki Road. Pat went in there like always, checked it
out, didn’t say anything. Then he lined
up everybody for a meeting and the plan unfolded. Two days later, they had completely gutted
the place. Just tore the insides out of
it. With the leftover lumber they built
surfboard racks along the side and a giant
eating table down the middle. Pat got
the Meade Hall idea from the old King Arthur books. That was the meeting place for all valiant
gladiators.”[36]

“Ala King Arthur,” Van Dyke wrote, “the
Knights of the Round Table and the meeting place known
as ‘Meade Hall,’ Curren proceeded to convert [the] place in like fashion. He took on a number of roommates, mostly
surfers from La Jolla, California, like Mike Diffenderfer, Al Nelson, Wayne Land and others. They razed all the inside separating walls,
except the bathroom. With the lumber,
they constructed surfboard racks from ceiling to floor, and
built a huge rabble with connected benches on both sides. It stretched the length of the one big room.

“When it was finished, Pat stood
back. ‘I think this will do; I’m going
surfing.’ With that, he strolled into
the backyard, picked up a machete, and hacked a couple of
branches from a Hale Koa tree. He tied these to the top of his battered car
and secured his board to the new rack.
Pat disappeared in a cloud of fumes, headed toward Sunset.”[37]

Ricky Grigg said Curren would sit at the head of the
table, often wearing a mock Viking helmet, “and he’d pound on the
table, going, ‘Ahh! Eat! We hungry!
Gotta surf big waves tomorrow!
Take wife and pull her by hair into room!’ Just totally joking around. I mean, the most Pat would ever say in a day
was about eight words, and I just said all eight of ‘em.”[38]

“There’s no way to express the look on
the owner’s face when he came the next month to collect the rent,” wrote Van
Dyke. “Needless to say, Meade Hall was short lived.”[39]

“I named Velzyland when I first began making
movies in ‘58,” Bruce Brown -- surfer and surf photographer -- said. “Velzy sponsored me and made my
boards, so I named this spot on the North Shore after him. John Severson, who founded SURFER magazine, was also making movies at
the time and named the same place, only used a different name. But Velzyland is the name that stuck. I also named Pipeline, and Severson came along and
renamed it BanzaiBeach. As a compromise, it became Banzai Pipeline. Now it’s Pipeline again.

“In the fifties, the North Shore was a dream. It was all so new. And so cheap to live there. You’d find every way you could to stretch a
hundred bucks. The deal was, who could
get the cheapest house and get the most people in it? You could rent a house then for sixty to
seventy dollars a month. With twelve
guys sharing the rent, that hundred bucks went a long way.

“As Greg developed as a big-wave
surfer, he’d work on all these schemes that were supposed to help a guy survive
a wipeout in big surf -- miniature aqualungs, tiny breathing devices. No one ever tried them out, but we all talked
about it a lot. You weren’t sure what
would happen in an extreme situation, other than that you would most likely
drown. Getting out into the lineup
during big surf was a big part of the battle.
No one would have thought of using a boat to get out, or a helicopter to get in.”[40]

“It used to be,” Bruce Brown
continued, “that all the guys who rode big waves were good watermen -- good swimmers, sailors or
paddlers who knew the ocean, the currents tides. You could get into a lot of trouble, get
sucked to the wrong side of WaimeaBay, if you didn’t know what you
were doing. If you get caught in a rip
at SunsetBeach you can almost do laps trying
to get in. The rip runs along the beach,
sucking you with it. If you know what
you’re doing, you can aim your board out to the break and the rip will propel
you out there towards it.

“At Waimea, the surf would come up fast
and make real serious sounds. I remember
one night when it made the windows in our house rattle. That same night, the surf covered up the
telephone poles with thirty feet of sand.
This tells you Waimea is closing out.

“A lot of people have surfed big waves
once or twice, then ended up preferring smaller waves. Greg became such a dominant big-wave rider
that I can’t even remember how he surfed little waves... even if no one had
been buying boards or shooting pictures, Greg still would have been out
there. The same holds true today among
big-wave riders. Their enthusiasm never
dies. They’re eternally stoked.

“Surfing won’t ever die, because
people get too stoked on it. I worry
about the guy today who starts surfing later in life. Like a kid, this older guy wants to surf
every single day. Pretty soon, he’s got
no wife, no kids, no job. He’s living
out of his car. Every surfer seems to go
through those first couple of crazy, devoted years, like we did as kids,
surfing every day because you never get enough of it...

“I don’t think Greg Noll is aware of the legend he
created. A few years ago he called me
after he had taken a trip back to the North Shore. He said, “Guess what? People remember me!” I said, “Noooo shit!”[41]

“There was fierce competition,” wrote
Noll, “on a friendly basis, of course, among the big-wave riders: Peter Cole, Pat Curren, Mike Stange, Jose Angel, Ricky Grigg, Buzzy Trent, George Downing and myself. This was the nucleus of guys during my time
who really enjoyed riding big waves.
Each guy had his own personality and his own deal.”[42]

In Greg
Noll‘s DA BULL, Life Over the Edge, Noll
recalled the first time Waimea Bay was “successfully” ridden by surfers following
the Hot Curlers of the 1930s and ‘40s. It was November 5, 1957.[44] It was
the beginning of Pat Curren’s enduring reputation as “King of The Bay.”

“Downing
and Trent had helped establish Makaha as the No. 1 big-wave or any-size-wave spot in
the Islands,” Noll wrote. “Up to this time,
the winter of 1957, no one
had ever ridden Waimea.”[45] This was
not entirely correct. Waimea had been surfed by the Hot Curl surfers in the late 1930s and beginning 40’s, but
after Dickie Cross’ drowning there in
1943, the spot
was considered voodoo and rarely -- if ever -- surfed.

“For three
years I had driven by the place,” continued Noll, talking about Waimea, “on my
way to surf Sunset Beach. I would
stop the car to look at Waimea Bay. If there
were waves, I’d hop up and down, trying to convince the other guys, and myself,
that Waimea was the thing to do. All the time, I was trying to build up my own
confidence.

“At that
time the North Shore was largely unexplored territory. We were kids
who had heard nothing but taboo-related stories about Waimea. There was a house
that all the locals believed was haunted. There were sacred Hawaiian ruins up in Waimea Canyon. And of
course, the mystique of Dickie Cross dying there. We’d drive by and see these big,
beautiful grinders... but the taboos were still too strong.”[46]

“The
forbiddenness of the place is what made Waimea Bay so compelling. I wanted to
try it but didn’t have the balls to go out by myself. So I kept promoting the
idea of breaking the Bay. Buzzy Trent, my main
opponent, started calling me the Pied Piper of Waimea. He said,
‘Follow Greg Noll and he’ll lead you off the edge of the world.
You’ll all drown like rats if you listen to the Pied Piper of Waimea Bay.’

“One day
in November, we stopped at Waimea just to take a look…”[47] What the
crew saw intrigued them, but Noll and company continued on to check Sunset, only later to return when
they heard it was being ridden.

It was “Harry Schurch, a
mild-mannered history teacher [and lifeguard] originally from Seal Beach,”
Steve Pezman reminded me, who “actually rode the first wave that day. The story
goes, he was maybe 10-15 minutes behind the Noll/Stang group that had stopped,
checked the Bay, and then drove on to check Sunset. He, too, stopped to look at
the Bay, but he had to get to work, and instead of leaving, he decided it
looked doable and paddled out, rode a couple, came in and left. Didn’t think
that much of it. “The guys at Sunset heard someone was out at the Bay, from
someone who had driven by, and hurried back, arriving just as Harry left. The
rest has become history.”[48]

“I was following Noll, Stange,
Curren, Al Nelson, Mike Diffenderfer... and Mickey Muñoz...” wrote Fred Van
Dyke, about the group that returned, after Schurch had left. “We always checked
it because it looked so glassy and clean, but then [usually] drove on to
Makaha. That day we stopped and got out of our cars. ‘Neat break, but a board
racker,’ said Nelson.

“Muñoz mumbled, ‘It didn’t look too
big anyway.’

“‘Too
peaky, no wall,’ said Curren. Noll was jumping up and down. His wife, Bev, was
trying to calm him.

“‘I’m
going to paddle out and just look at it,” said Greg. Noll was always the
stoker, the initiator, and Stange usually followed suit.

“Mike went
with me,” continued Noll. “We were the first [of our group] in the water. I was
the first to catch a wave. I had paddled for one outside and missed it, so I
took off on a small inside wave. By then the other guys had come in too. Pat
Curren and I rode the next big wave together. And
that was it. It was simple. The ocean didn’t swallow us up, and the world
didn’t stop turning. That was how Waimea got busted. By me, Mike Stange, Mickey
Munoz, Pat Curren, Bing
Copeland, Del Cannon and Bob Bermell.”[50]

... and Harry Schurch.

According
to Van Dyke, “They all hit the water and Munoz was first to paddle by the deep
spot where the point swings in on top of you and it looks like a mountain ready
to break, and then it heads back to the point because of the deep spot. Munoz practically fainted when he saw the size of
that first wave up close. What had appeared as a small peak from half a mile
away now loomed as a gigantic 20 plus wall. Munoz went off first on a 20 footer
and dug a rail half way down.

“Greg
screamed. ‘Jeez, it looks like a mountain.’ Curren ended upside down on a late takeoff. Stange
and Noll got the wave of the day, Stange taking a cannonball spin out from inside of
Greg, coming up 100 yards inside of where he wiped out.”[51]

To
Curren’s recollection, no one really made a wave successfully that session. “We
thought it was maybe 12 feet. We got a big surprise when we got out there. I
don’t think anybody made a wave.”[52]

“Within
minutes,” wrote Greg Noll, “word
spread into Haleiwa that Waimea Bay was being ridden. We looked across the point
and saw cars and people lining up along the road watching the crazy haoles
riding Waimea Bay. There
must have been a hundred people -- a big crowd for that time.”[53]

“I’d love
to say something heroic,” Noll admitted in Surfers,
The Movie, “I’d
love to say we made history. But basically it was a bunch of guys parked around
the Bay there, and somebody grabbed a board and went surfing, and it looked so
good the rest of us guys said, ‘Hey, we got to get in on this.’“[54]

The guy who first grabbed his board
thisNovember 5, 1957was Harry
Schurch. Next, it was Greg Noll and the “rest of the guys.”

“The irony
of it all was,” Greg Noll remembered, “it wasn’t a very big day by
Waimea standards. Just nice-shaped waves. I spun out
on one wave and wrenched my shoulder. It’s still screwed up from that first day
at Waimea. We were using ridiculous equipment, boards
that we had brought over from the Mainland.
Definitely not made for big waves. We had a long ways to go in big-wave riding
and big-wave-board design.”[55]

“When we
first surfed Waimea,” Noll continued, “we weren’t conscious of making history,
other than on the level of that particular time. For me the excitement came
from competing with the other guys and from riding as big a wave as I was
capable of riding... The irony was, at the end of the first day, when we were
all sitting together rehashing our rides, everybody wondered, ‘Why the hell
have we been sitting on the beach for the past three years?’ It wasn’t a huge
break that day. Waimea was just trying to be itself. Later we were introduced
to the real Waimea.

“To be
Waimea, the
waves have to break fifteen to eighteen feet before they start triggering on
the reefs. To be good, solid Waimea, it has to be the type of break that rolls
around the point, with a good, strong, twenty-foot-or-bigger swell. A lot of
big-wave riders disagree on a lot of things, but I don’t think any of them
would disagree about this: to be good Waimea, it has to have more than size. It
has to have a certain look and feel. A little bit of wind coming out of the
valley, pushing the waves back, holding them up a bit.”[56]

Fred Van
Dyke remembers the waves that day being much bigger
and went on to write about surfing Waimea Bay back in the late 1950s, in
general:

“Even
though I love ‘The Bay,’ I
admit, deep down, the best part of surfing Waimea on a huge day -- one over
twenty feet, which is not very often -- is when you are walking up the beach,
thinking back over the waves, the wipeouts, the rip that takes you toward the
huge boulders and threatens to smash you upon those boulders if you don’t make
shore before the other side of the rock the kids dive from in summer. Yes, for
me, walking up that beach, safe for another day -- alive -- is the payoff.

“Many
years ago, when Sunset Beach closed out, we packed up our boards and headed
for Makaha. I remember
that we would drive by Waimea Bay, stop,
and look at the wave breaking off the point. The consensus, since nobody had
surfed ‘The Bay,’ was that it wasn’t big enough, and who would want to surf
such a narrow peak? Besides, it looked as though it broke exactly on the rocks,
a definite board racker.

“Greg Noll was the first to paddle out [from the group
that had returned after Schurch left]. Whenever a place was tried for the first
time, Greg usually stoked us to go out. On this particular October day in 1957, ‘The
Bay’ was challenged for the first time by a group of Californians. Al Nelson, Pat
Curren, Mike
Diffenderfer, Mike
Stange, Mickey
Munoz and later, after school, by me.

“‘The Bay‘ won, but
a new surf spot was opened for exploration. The takeoff was nearly impossible,
jacking up ten feet after you dropped in, and the wipeout in deep water so
thick that you were held down long periods and pushed along for a hundred yards
in thick soup.

“One thing
we found out on that first day -- it being over twenty feet -- was that when
you lost your board most of the time it popped out in the rip and drifted right
back to you. We also found that our boards were totally inadequate. A new
design had to be created to handle ‘The Bay.’”[57]

“After
that first day in ‘57,” Greg
Noll concluded, “Waimea Bay joined Sunset Beach, Noll’s
Reef and Laniakea as accepted North Shore surf spots. Pipeline, at that
time, was still a ways down the road. All the great spots that are still the
great spots today were established within our first four years in the Islands.
After that, surfers surfed and named every ripple along the North Shore.”[58]

And that
was how the thirteen year old tabu associated with surfing at Waimea was broken
in mild (by Waimea standards) 12-to-15 foot surf. But, as Noll declared many
years later, “There were some hairy days to come.”[59]

Greg Noll is most often given credit
for being the first one to ride Waimea after Dickie Cross died there and Woody
Brown nearly ate it there. This is in good part because Bud Browne was there to
film Noll’s crew riding Waimea and crowds of people watched from the road.
Similar to how Phil Edwards is credited for being the first to ride the Banzai
Pipeline because it was shot on film. Steve Pezman is quick to point out that
the generally recognized history of that first day is “not the real story. What
Greg and Harry’s versions do agree on was that it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe a 15’
day, just beginning to crumble on the outside. The real heroics there would
come later —- with a lot of the same players, except for Harry, who after
riding it first in the modern era, got out of the service, went home and never
came back. Until...

“On one of the years I was
introducing the invitees to the Eddie at Waimea, I invited Harry to join me on
the trip (at Quiksilver’s expense) and introduced him at the opening banquet to
all the current day heroes. After he told his story they stood and gave this
older scholarly looking gentleman a standing O, then the evening wound down,
the crowd went home, and that was that.

“Except that for Harry, who had been
overlooked all those years, it was closure. He didn’t care about the act
itself, called it overrated, no big deal, but, being a history teacher, it
bothered him to hear the inaccurate versions go into the books.

“It was Munoz who answered, ‘Actually,
it was a guy named Harry Schurch!’, when I long ago asked him who took off
first. Knowing Mickey, that figures.”[60]

“For many
years Waimea was surfed only on those few days of the year when everywhere else
on the NorthShore was closed out,” Fred Van
Dyke wrote, bringing the story of
The Bay up to present day. “Now, the
cord [leash] makes it possible to surf it from hot dog size all the way up the
scale. This creates a false impression,
by some, that they have ridden ‘The Bay.’

“... [big
wave rider] Ken Bradshaw put it succinctly. A young kid came into Karen Gallagher‘s surf shop across from
Kammie’s market and bragged to Bradshaw and
others that he’d just ridden Waimea.

“Bradshaw
looked at him and said, ‘Waimea hasn’t broken in four years.’“[61]